In 2018, marine scientists and oceanographers demonstrated how serious science and imagination — plus a healthy dose of fun — dovetail when they began sending decorated styrofoam cups into the deep sea and sharing the results on Twitter.

Marine biologist Skylar Bayer, a research associate at NOAA Fisheries, started the hashtag #shrunkencupoff, and the deep-sea science community was off and running, tweeting images of their compressed cups and objects, including some that resembled shrunken heads.

Science and the scientific method depends on the systematic and logical approach scientists take in learning how things work. The word “science” is from the Latin word scientia, which means “knowledge” or “science,” especially “knowledge based on demonstrable and reproducible data,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

“I was part of the marine biology team on an oceanographic cruise in the summer of 2018, which involved a month-long expedition to study deep-sea biodiversity in a largely unexplored region of the central Pacific Ocean,” says Regan Drennan, who is a PhD candidate at the UK’s Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.

Taking styrofoam cups to the ocean bottom in order to shrink them is a tradition in deep-sea research, Drennan says. The researchers decorate the cups with pictures, names, dates and details about the expedition in permanent marker. “Comparing our shrunken cups through a Twitter thread was something fun to do during down time on the cruise,” she says. Drennan’s primary research is focused on polychaete communities found under Antarctica’s ice shelf; her decorated styrofoam cups often featured worms.

At recreational diving depths, water pressure can begin to compress lightweight objects, but at deeper depths where research submersibles and equipment are capable of going, objects like styrofoam cups are crushed dramatically, deformed and squeezed to a fraction of their original size.

In June 2018, Drennan, who likes to draw, decorated some styrofoam cups and attached them to an oceanographic tool that samples and collects data 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) deep. “It’s called a CTD [Conductivity Temperature Depth],” says Drennan. The CTD is composed of sensors that measure salinity, pressure, temperature. It is attached to a metal frame called a rosette that holds specialized bottles that close at predetermined intervals in order to collect water samples at different depths. The CTD is lowered and recovered from the target depth via a winch attached to the ship, and is generally what is most often used as the conveyor of the styrofoam cups — “it’s a pretty straightforward, up and down journey, and there’s a low risk of the cups getting in the way of it functioning, as they may do with more intricate experimental setups or equipment with a lot of moving parts, such as a remotely operated vehicle,” Drennan says.

HOW IT WORKS

Styrofoam is composed of polystyrene beads expanded by bubbles of air (for example, packing peanuts). “The immense pressure that the cups experience in the deep sea from the weight of the kilometers of water above squeezes out the air from the styrofoam,” explains Drennan, “leaving behind a shrunken, polystyrene matrix that’s a fraction of the size of the original cup.”

As you know from your open water course, one atmosphere is equal to the weight of the earth’s atmosphere at sea level. At the ocean’s surface, air pressure is about 14.6 pounds per square inch (or one atmosphere). On average, the pressure increases about one atmosphere for every 10 meters (33 feet) you dive.

The researchers began sharing the cups with friends and families, as a “postcard” of sorts, but they were also used for scientific outreach and for raising awareness, Drennan says. “It is such a simple, classic experiment to demonstrate the extreme pressures found in these habitats, and to show what the animals that live there experience day to day.

RAISING AWARENESS

Drennan says it is “a unique and special opportunity to be able to go to sea and study these habitats in the field, so the cups become treasured keepsakes and mementos,” but she also notes that the #shrunkencupoff Twitter thread brought awareness to “what’s happening to our oceans in terms of plastic pollution, particularly microplastics.”

Microplastics are any type of plastic fragment that is less than 5 mm (0.2 inches) in length. Polystyrene is non-biodegradable and it accumulates along shores and waterways, especially in its foam form; it is one of the most common microplastic found on the ocean’s surface.

“It was both breathtaking and humbling to see such an alien, near-pristine and untouched world, so remote yet still part of our planet,” says Drennan of her expedition to the central Pacific. “From a scientist’s perspective, it’s really exciting to think that there are still places on earth we know so little about about, and that there is so much left to discover — to this day, the vast majority of animals we recover from the deep sea are new to science.”

But with so many threats facing the ocean, Drennan says, “it is important now more than ever to learn as much as we can about the world’s oceans — what lives in them and how it is changing, so that we can best protect them.”